What is it like to live with—and even love—someone who, it turns out, is a monster? Two new memoirs describe such a reality and they make for upsetting reading.
“I’ve done a good job with this kid,” Sue Klebold thought to herself after chatting pleasantly with her son Dylan about that evening’s Columbine High School senior prom, which he had attended. Seventy two hours later, on April 20, 1999, she would be the mother of a mass murderer and her family would find itself at the center of one of the worst national traumas in American history, in which Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into their Littleton, Colorado school and murdered 12 classmates, a teacher, and injured two dozen more, before killing themselves. In A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy, her searching account of the Columbine horror and her long effort to understand how her son could become a remorseless executioner, what first comes to light is the seeming normality of the Klebold household—and her son. “You wouldn’t nervously herd your child away from Dylan if you saw him on a park bench. In fact, after a few minutes chatting with him, you’d be more likely to invite him home for dinner,” she writes.
Indeed, this young man was outwardly a wonderful kid. Academically gifted (at least in early childhood), a keen baseball pitcher, an artistically sensitive origami hobbyist, self-reliant, a computer whiz, Dylan held down an afterschool job at the local pizza joint and had a close circle of friends. He had been accepted at the University of Arizona and looked forward to studying computer science and experiencing the hot, dry desert climate. But Sue Klebold unflinchingly probes deeper; dark signs, perhaps only noticeable with hindsight, emerge. Dylan’s junior year was marked by academic underachievement, suspension from school in a computer-hacking incident, and petty vandalism of a locker. He took to wearing a floor length black leather trench coat. More seriously, he and close friend Harris (his accomplice in the murder rampage and a clear psychopath, as the evidence would later show) were arrested for stealing electronic equipment, a felony charge. They attended a juvenile rehabilitation program, performed community service, and wound up getting released early for good conduct.
Should the Klebolds have seen these troubles as omens of something worse to come? Should they have recognized their son’s depression and the baleful influence on him of the violent Harris? Perhaps, but many parents who’ve navigated the rough waters of male adolescence will be familiar with their teens’ bad behavior, dubious friends, questionable fashion choices, and disputes with authority. And in 1999, we were all innocent of the awful phenomenon of mass school shootings. There remains a mystery to Columbine that Sue Klebold’s book doesn’t finally solve.
David Kaczynski’s Every Last Tie: The Story of the Unabomber and His Family tells a tragic story that may be easier to understand. David and his older brother Ted, who in the 1990s would become the notorious Unabomber—mailing 17 bombs that killed three and injured many more in a lone terrorist war against technological society—grew up in a close-knit working-class family in the 1950s Chicago suburbs. From his earliest years, Ted revealed himself to be a math supergenius. “I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware that my brother was ‘special,’” David notes.
Already showing signs of serious mental illness, Ted was a vulnerable and emotionally fragile young man when his parents packed him off to Harvard at just 16 to study advanced mathematics. His experience there was traumatizing. He was subjected to lacerating and humiliating psychological experiments at the hands of a sadistic CIA researcher, Henry Murray. The test, given to Ted with his parents’ consent, was called “Multiform Assessments of Personality Development Among Gifted College Men,” and it sought to observe the effects of tearing down a subject’s personality. Ripped from his home, emotionally unequipped to deal with university, much less enduring being treated as a guinea-pig treatment in a mad experiment, Ted came to hate his well-meaning but naive parents for abandoning him and failing to protect him.
This anger—and David Kaczynski, today a Buddhist anti-death penalty activist, shows how understandable it was—would translate later to a more lethal rage at technology, leaving the death and dismemberment of strangers in its aftermath. It would be David, recognizing his brother as the Unabomber, who alerted the FBI, an agonizing decision that ended the campaign of mail bombs.
So what is the takeaway from these two books? Is there a generalizable principle that we can apply to prevent future Columbine killers or Unabombers? We all want a world where nothing is left to chance, where contingency is mastered and we always can place blame. Gun control! First-person-shooter video games! Harvard! And it’s true that, looking back, it would have been a good idea for the Klebolds to read Dylan’s private journals and see the evidence of his desperate loneliness. They should have forbidden any contact with Eric Harris. The Kaczynskis should never have sent Ted away to Harvard as a mentally fragile adolescent.
Yet these two powerful memoirs point to the limitations of such exercises in retrospective wisdom. In both tragedies, the monsters became what they were slowly, and in ways that their parents didn’t recognize, and probably couldn’t have recognized, as it was happening. With great compassion for their loved ones’ many victims, both authors call for reforming our broken mental-health system, but it’s not clear how reforms could have prevented either awful denouement. At the heart of each account remains the central puzzle of a unique human being and a specific family dynamic, and the inexplicable workings of life.
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